Director of Data

We're hiring a Director of Data to lead First Connect's data function and build our data into a real competitive moat. You'll report to the CPO, manage and grow our lean data team, and partner across the leadership table. The role is roughly 70% Build & Operate, 30% Lead & Influence in year one, shifting toward 50/50 as the team scales. About First Connect First Connect is an insurance marketplace and aggregator. We connect thousands of independent insurance agencies with a wide network of carriers, MGAs, and wholesalers. We sit at a vantage point neither agents nor carriers have on their own, and turning that asymmetric view into proprietary intelligence is one of the most important things we'll do over the next several years. What you'll do • Lead and grow our data team. Set direction, raise the bar, make their job better. • Make self-service analytics real across First Connect, so every leader gets to their answers without queuing behind the data team. • Create a contracts-based partnership with the engineering teams producing source data. • Build a core proprietary data asset that powers our internal and partner-facing experiences and anchors real conversations with our carriers. • Own the data infrastructure roadmap and the question of how we evolve our data engineering investment over the next 12–24 months. • Define how AI gets leveraged across our data stack and analytical workflows. • Be the data partner the leadership team actually wants to call. Who you are • You've led a data team inside a startup. You're a player-coach, comfortable writing SQL one day, pushing back on C-level the next. Startup experience is essential. • You operate via contracts with source teams, not central ownership of every dataset. You've held source teams accountable for data quality. • You're technically broad enough to make warehouse, ELT, and orchestration decisions. Fluent in the modern data stack: a major BI tool (Sigma, Looker, Mode, Hex), dbt, Postgres or Snowflake or BigQuery or Redshift, ingestion tooling like Fivetran. • You have a real point of view on AI in data work and can describe what you'd try first. • You connect data investments to revenue, cost, retention, and competitive position. You bring questions, not just answers. Nice to have Insurance, Insurtech, or marketplace experience. Direct experience standing up a modern BI platform.